LANG SON, Viet Nam, 7 December 2006 – Nguyen Thi Phuong cherishes her new role as a mother. At 45, she’s older than most Vietnamese women raising their first child, but that hardly matters. She is happy to have her own family, now that she is no longer a prisoner in someone else’s. In 1991, Phuong was lured to the border by traffickers and taken against her will to China, where she was dragged to a house in a small town and sold to become an older man’s wife. “I didn’t know how old he was or the name of the place we lived,” she said. “I lost my freedom. I had to go everywhere with his family or else I was locked in a room. I had to work hard. When I was tired or sick, they didn’t let me stop working.”